I'm fairly new to the whole CG scene and I'm currently learning Maya, however, I have a question about the rendering options. I'v looked through many pieces of art that were done using Maya and it seems that Mental Ray is what everyone uses for their renders. Basically I would just like to know what the other two (Maya Software and Maya Hardware) are used for? If Mental Ray is so popular then surely that's the best one to use right?

Thanks in advance

derik

07-16-2009, 03:04 PM

Most renderers are great in one area, like Mental Ray's strong point is super fast ray tracing.
If you compare raytraced render times of Mental Ray and Maya software , mental Ray kicks butt.
But on the other hand , if you dont use ray tracing in your render (for mattes ect.) , Maya software is way faster than Mental Ray.
Renderers like Maxwell Render is extremely accurate (with GI , caustcs and any physical light calculations), but can take days to render a single frame.

Earlier versions of maya , you could only render particles with mayaHardware , (luckely its supported by software renderers now)

In my opinion , it all depends on what you want to achieve.

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